Why do some contacts have empty columns?

The columns are sized to the contact with the most emails or phones. Contacts with fewer leave those cells empty, which keeps every row aligned.

Where did the contact photos go?

Removed. Each is tens of kilobytes of Base64 that would make the spreadsheet unusable, and can exceed Excel’s cell limit. The count is reported.

My accented names look like Bj=C3=B8rn.

That is quoted-printable encoding from vCard 2.1, and it is decoded automatically here. If you still see it, the text was double-encoded by whatever produced the file.

Outlook gave me hundreds of separate .vcf files.

Drop the whole folder. Every file is converted, and you can download the results as a ZIP.

Is this safe for other people’s personal data?

Uploading an address book to a third-party service is a disclosure of other people’s personal data, and under the GDPR that needs a lawful basis you almost certainly do not have. Nothing is transmitted here, so the question does not arise. Turn your Wi-Fi off and check.

Can I convert several files at once?

Yes — drop as many as you like, or a whole folder. Each keeps its original name and you can download them individually or as a ZIP.

VCF to CSV Converter — Contacts to Spreadsheet, No Upload

Turns an exported address book into a spreadsheet. This is the conversion you should be least willing to do on someone else's server: a .vcf is other people's names, phone numbers, home addresses and birthdays, and uploading it discloses their data, not yours.

Contacts do not have a fixed shape

One contact has a single work email; the next has three emails, two phones and a postal address. A fixed column set would truncate the second, so the columns are computed from the widest contact in your file: if anyone has four phone numbers, everyone gets four phone columns.

Each gets a type and a value — Phone 1 - Type, Phone 1 - Value — matching the layout Google Contacts uses on import, so the result can generally go straight back into an address book.

Postal addresses are split into street, city, region, postal code and country rather than jammed into one cell, because the whole point of a spreadsheet is being able to sort and filter on them.

Photos are dropped, deliberately

vCards can embed a contact photo as Base64. A single one is typically twenty to sixty kilobytes of text, and a spreadsheet cell full of it is unreadable and unusable — Excel will also refuse cells beyond about 32,000 characters, so a photo can silently break the import.

They are removed and counted. If you need the photos, keep the original .vcf.

The three vCard versions, and mojibake

vCard 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0 differ in how they write parameters and how they encode text. All three are read here.

The one that causes visible problems is 2.1, which allows quoted-printable encoding — a name like Bj=C3=B8rn in the raw file. Tools that ignore it show exactly that string to the user. It is decoded here, and you are told how many values needed it.

Type parameters are also normalised: TEL;CELL (2.1), TEL;TYPE=CELL (3.0) and TEL;TYPE=cell (4.0) all come out as "Mobile".

Where the file comes from

iPhone: Contacts → select all → Share. Or on a Mac, Contacts → File → Export → Export vCard.

Android: Contacts → Settings → Export to .vcf file.

Google Contacts: Export → vCard. (It also offers CSV directly, which skips this step.)

Outlook: exports one .vcf per contact by default — drop the whole folder here and every one is converted at once.

Other names for this

Also searched as “vcard to csv”, “contacts to excel”, “vcf to spreadsheet”.

Questions

Why do some contacts have empty columns?: The columns are sized to the contact with the most emails or phones. Contacts with fewer leave those cells empty, which keeps every row aligned.
Where did the contact photos go?: Removed. Each is tens of kilobytes of Base64 that would make the spreadsheet unusable, and can exceed Excel’s cell limit. The count is reported.
My accented names look like Bj=C3=B8rn.: That is quoted-printable encoding from vCard 2.1, and it is decoded automatically here. If you still see it, the text was double-encoded by whatever produced the file.
Outlook gave me hundreds of separate .vcf files.: Drop the whole folder. Every file is converted, and you can download the results as a ZIP.
Is this safe for other people’s personal data?: Uploading an address book to a third-party service is a disclosure of other people’s personal data, and under the GDPR that needs a lawful basis you almost certainly do not have. Nothing is transmitted here, so the question does not arise. Turn your Wi-Fi off and check.
Can I convert several files at once?: Yes — drop as many as you like, or a whole folder. Each keeps its original name and you can download them individually or as a ZIP.